Supervisor Last Name: Rvachew Supervisor First Name: Susan
McGill Dept/School: Communication Sciences and Disorders
Faculty Professor (Full, Associate or Assistant): Full Professor
Email: susan.rvachew@mcgill.ca Phone No. (optional):
Research Field: motor speech disorders Proposal No. (1 or 2): 1/1
Research Location (McGill or affiliated institution): McGill
Ethics approval will be required for proposed project (Yes/No): I have ethics approval for this project
Proposed project will involve chart reviews (Yes/No): no
Project Title (maximum 1 line):
Hypothesis/Question to be Addressed (maximum 4 lines):Children with Down Syndrome and unintelligible speech will show a clearly differentiated response to one of two interventions (one targeting phonological planning and the other targeting motor planning), with their response predicted by their profile on an extensive pretreatment assessment of underlying speech processes in the cognitive, linguistic and motoric domains.
Specific Aims (maximum 10 lines): Childhood apraxia of speech is a rare and severe motor speech disorder characterized by inconsistent speech errors, impaired coarticulation and inappropriate prosody. It occurs as an idiopathic disorder and in the context of complex neurodevelopmental syndromes. Recent studies reveal that while rare the disorder is associated with considerable heterogeneity at the genotype, endophenotype and phenotype levels and thus it is not surprising that we are finding, through the use of a unique single subject randomization design, that children with CAS show marked individual differences in response to treatment approaches that target specific aspects of speech processing or function. In this project we will explore the response of children with Down syndrome who have difficulties with speech motor planning to interventions targeting phonological versus motor planning. We will compare the response of Down syndrome patients to that of previous patients with other syndromes who have received these interventions for the remediation of speech accuracy.
Role of Student (maximum 15 lines): The role of the student will be to (1) conduct a thorough review of the literature regarding the speech characteristics and cognitive-linguistic and motoric underpinnings of speech delay in the Down Syndrome population, with a view to developing a more specific hypothesis for this project; (2) provide two interventions targeting two speech goals to an individual child with Down Syndrome, using a single subject randomization design; (3) analyze the data from same day and next day session probes in order to determine the child’s response to the two interventions over a six week period; (4) write a report and produce a poster describing the child’s response to the interventions in comparison to (i) other children with idiopathic childhood apraxia of speech that have received these interventions and to (ii) one child with Cornelia de Lange syndrome who received these interventions previously.